November, 2008

Last week at the Professional Developers Conference , we made a number of very exciting announcements regarding the future of Visual Basic. Here is the list of VB 2010 features we've announced:
Collection Initializers . Initialize collections in...

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is now publicly available! It's time to try out the features that you've been hearing about from the PDC. :)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=922B4655...

One of the improvements in VS2010 (CTP available for download here ) is drag and drop data binding for WPF. Drag-drop data binding has been available for WinForms since Visual Studio 2005. So those of you that are familiar with that will find the WPF...

Yesterday I turned a year older, and spent the day meeting new people at user groups in Spain. Here's how the day went:
07:45 Meet our host, VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano. Leave the hotel in Barcelona and head to Vic in our van, rented for the week.
09...

Didn't make it to the PDC? No problem. You can still check out the *hottest* presentation at the Professional Developers Conference this year, available publicly on demand! Paul Vick (Principal Architect) and Lucian Wischik (VB Specification Lead &...

This year at the Professional Developers Conference , there was a new trend called PDC badges. To fully understand the buzz, check out the following blog post and Channel9 video by Adam Kinney (badge extraordinaire):
http://adamkinney.com/blog/366...

Visual Basic 9.0 introduces a feature called XML Literals , which makes programming against XML a lot more natural, and dramatically decreases the number of lines of code you need to write. In fact, it makes working with XML in Visual Basic *so* much...

This week Jonathan Aneja and I are traveling from city to city, and presenting to VB.Net user groups in Spain. We began the tour in Barcelona where we were speaking at TechEd EMEA, and will finish in Madrid. VB MVP Pep Lluis Blano organized the entire...

That's right... All sessions from last week's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles have been videotaped and made available for FREE on Channel9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/
Check it out and enjoy the conference. :)
For photos...

I recently blogged about the new VB 2010 language features announced at PDC, as well as the video available from Paul and Lucian's "VB Futures" session . Another way to learn about the new features coming out in 2010 is by watching the following Channel9...

This past month we've been posting interviews with the team from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole . This time we have Doug Rothaus, a writer on the documentation side. Doug has blogged up an XML cookbook here on the team blog with a bunch...

In this short 10min video, I interview language architect Paul Vick about what industry trends he would think about while designing the Visual Basic language. Some of these trends have motivated features in the next version of the Visual Basic language...

In this video, I interviewed language architect Paul Vick about what new language features are coming in the next release of Visual Basic. We talked about auto-implemented properties, collection initializers, statement lambdas, removal of the line continuation...

I just posted a new Channel 9 video with Milind Lele , Program Manager on the Visual Studio Pro Tools team. In this interview Milind shows one of the new RAD improvements I was talking about that is coming to WPF in Visual Studio 2010 -- Drag-Drop...

After three and a half days visiting user groups through Spain, Jon and I have flown back to the US. We got to meet some great people and had lots of fun talking about VB. The slide decks that we used on the trip are attached at the end of this post....

Using Visual Basic, and thinking about Functional Programming? Here's an excerpt from Eric White's blog , explaining why you should:
Functional Programming (FP) has the potential to reduce program line count by 20% to 50%, reduce bugs and increase...

Here's a community interview from our Italian Visual Basic MVP Alessandro Del Sole , this time with Lucian Wischik, a Developer on the team. I'm just getting to know Lucian but he is a very interesting and bright person who is just a pleasure to talk...

After you discover the PDC videos online , and you watch the Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic , you may wonder what other sessions this year's PDC has to offer for the VB developer... Lots!
Here's a list of PDC sessions related to the VB...

Last week at the Professional Developers Conference , the VB and C# teams held a special dinner in honor of the VB and C# MVPs in attendance. ("MVP" = Most Valued Professional ) It was a great opportunity to connect with folks, talk about the exciting...

By now, you have heard of all the great new features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 . Now that you've developed your new applications, you want to include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a prerequisite in your Setup project or...

I'm here at TechEd Barcelona, and the week has gotten off to a great start. Jason Zander did the keynote this afternoon, and announced lots of great tooling support that will be included in Visual Studio 2010! Exciting stuff.
I have 4 sessions here...

I posted two more WPF "Forms over Data" videos onto the Developer Center that you should check out. How Do I: Edit Tabular Data in WPF? - learn how to create a simple data grid in WPF for editing tabular data using Visual Studio 2008 Service...

"My dog has no type." "How does he smell?" " Awful! "
Two of the new features of VB10 -- array literals and multi-line lambdas -- are interesting from the language perspective because their expressions have no type! This article is for language lawyers...